Experience and trust — A systems-theoretic approach

An influential model of agent trust and experience is that of Jonker and Treur [Jonker and Treur 99]. In that model an agent uses its experience of the interactions of another agent to assess that agent’s trustworthiness. We showed that key properties of that model are subsumed by classical mathematical systems theory. Using the latter theory we also clarify the issue of when two experience sequences may be regarded as equivalent. An intuitive feature of the Jonker and Treur model is that experience sequence orderings are respected by functions that map such sequences to trust orderings. We raise a question about another intuitive property — that of continuity of these functions, viz. that they map experience sequences that resemble each other to trust values that also resemble each other. Using fundamental results in the relationship between partial orders and topologies we also showed that these two intutive properties are essentially equivalent.